In an article on FrontPage.com, Chris Blackburn claims that the British government is forging links with extremist Islamist organisations such as the Jamaat-i-Islami, which has ties to terrorism and rejects western ideologies and institutions. He writes:
'The British government has been the prime candidate for being two-faced in the War on Terror, possibly more so than Saudi Arabia. The British authorities have repeatedly shown a lack of clarity and consistency in dealing with radical Islamists. They have adopted poor strategies for tackling Islamist groups in the UK. The UK government has formed a strategy called Project Contest to steer British Muslims away from Islamist radicals[1], a novel idea which could have disastrous long-term effects. While this strategy of rolling back Islamists is supposedly being implemented, the government itself has been having highly publicized meetings with representatives from the Islamic Foundation UK and other groups tied to the Jamaat-i-Islami. The consequence of this is that the British government and Scotland Yard have recently let representatives from the Muslim Brotherhood take over the infamous Finsbury Park Mosque.
'The British government has thus engaged in a type of appeasement by negotiating with groups with suspected links to terror. The Islamic Foundation is the UK branch of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), a known fundamentalist party which has ties to the Taliban, and many JI members themselves have ties to Al-Qaeda and other Jihadi groups...It has been rumored that the Islamic Foundation will have a major input into the curriculum of Islamic schools in the UK'.
I myself have been told that the British government has decided that the way to tackle the problem of Islamist extremism is to attempt to pacify it. There seems to be a belief in official circles that by embracing extremism and inviting it into the charmed circles of government you draw its venom. But as the discrete and less lethal problem of Sinn Fein/IRA has demonstrated (see post below) the far more likely outcome of such a foolhardy embrace is a fatal bite or slow strangulation.
